Obama's Gaza dilemma

President Barack Obama’s trouble from the violence in Gaza won’t end with the cease-fire that Hamas announced is coming Tuesday.

The rocket fire would end and the Israeli ground operation would be averted — following days of conversations between Obama and the leaders involved that included four calls to Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi as the rocket fire was exchanged and a decision to dispatch Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for an emergency trip.

But that doesn’t change a larger situation: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is moving forward on his own. Hamas is emboldened by the changes in Arab leadership and isn’t interested in listening to the Americans. And it’s not clear to what extent Morsi will hold Egypt to the region’s oldest peace treaty or tilt its support to the people firing rockets out of Gaza.

That’s a big problem for a president going into a second term with a complicated Middle East agenda far broader than the stalled Israeli-Palestinian two-state peace deal he supports. He’s staring down an Iranian nuclear threat. The Arab Spring is reverberating in Syria, Libya and beyond. The world’s least stable region is getting less stable, and Obama is stuck in the middle.

He needs the Arab nations of the Middle East and North Africa to view him as an honest broker if he is to have any success in shepherding a Palestinian state, let alone managing the Arab Spring nations’ transitions to democracy and building a long-term American relationship with the new wave of Islamist populism.

But Obama is sticking with longstanding foreign policy and American political opinion. He has said repeatedly that he fully supports Israel’s right to defend itself and laid the blame for the latest round of violence on Hamas.

Obama tried to finesse the situation by saying it is “preferable” that Hamas stop shelling Israeli territory without an Israeli ground attack, but did not go so far as to warn against one.

“There’s no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders,” Obama said Sunday in Bangkok. “So we are fully supportive of Israel’s right to defend itself from missiles landing on people’s homes and workplaces and potentially killing civilians. And we will continue to support Israel’s right to defend itself.”

It’s a saga familiar to American presidents, who’ve seen their broader Middle East peace goals thwarted by an Arab-Israeli conflict that’s been going on since 1948. That’s despite Obama’s pledge during his first presidential campaign to “advance the cause of peace from the start of my administration,” and two years after he set the goal of Middle East peace within a year while speaking at the United Nations.

That’s proved difficult, as Obama acknowledged.

“Those who champion the cause of the Palestinians should recognize that if we see a further escalation of the situation in Gaza, then the likelihood of us getting back on any kind of peace track that leads to a two-state solution is going to be pushed off way into the future,” Obama said. “And so if we’re serious about wanting to resolve this situation and create a genuine peace process, it starts with no more missiles being fired into Israel’s territory, and that then gives us the space to try to deal with these longstanding conflicts that exist.”

Add to that Obama’s reliance on Morsi, a rookie on the world stage elected from the Muslim Brotherhood to lead the country that had been the stabilizing force in the region for the past 35 years. Obama turned to him repeatedly as the conflict escalated as his best hope to resolve the situation.

“President Obama underscored once again the importance of working for a de-escalation to the conflict in Gaza. He commended President Morsi’s efforts to pursue a de-escalation,” Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said Tuesday, following the latest call, which lasted close to half an hour. “And he also underscored that President Morsi’s efforts reinforce the important role that President Morsi and Egypt play on behalf of regional security and the pursuit of broader peace between the Palestinians and Israelis.”

“What the U.S. will want to see is Israel clearly define its objective and quickly accomplish those, because of the fear is the longer this goes on the louder the international outcry is,” said Michael Singh, managing director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a National Security Council official during the Bush administration. “The U.S. has to think about what is the message, what actions are they taking toward the other states in the region?”

Aside from withholding billions in foreign aid — which would likely throw Egypt into chaos — Obama has few options. On Sunday, Obama said it is “preferable” that Hamas stop shelling Israeli territory without an Israeli ground attack but did not go so far as to warn against one.

The subtext of the official White House accounts of Obama’s calls to Morsi is that the Egyptian president is Obama’s — and Israel’s — best hope to get Hamas to back down.

“This is a test of the U.S.-Egypt relationship,” Singh said. “President Obama has invested in developing a relationship with Morsi and his government, and in key moments like this, that relationship is tested. When these key moments come, can you persuade them in seeing the interest they have in de-escalating the situation?”

“President Obama underscored once again the importance of working for a de-escalation to the conflict in Gaza. He commended President Morsi’s efforts to pursue a de-escalation,” Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said Tuesday, following the latest call, which lasted close to half an hour. “And he also underscored that President Morsi’s efforts reinforce the important role that President Morsi and Egypt play on behalf of regional security and the pursuit of broader peace between the Palestinians and Israelis.”

“What the U.S. will want to see is Israel clearly define its objective and quickly accomplish those, because of the fear is the longer this goes on the louder the international outcry is,” said Michael Singh, managing director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a National Security Council official during the Bush administration. “The U.S. has to think about what is the message, what actions are they taking toward the other states in the region?”

Aside from withholding billions in foreign aid — which would likely throw Egypt into chaos — Obama has few options. On Sunday, Obama said it is “preferable” that Hamas stop shelling Israeli territory without an Israeli ground attack but did not go so far as to warn against one.

The subtext of the official White House accounts of Obama’s calls to Morsi is that the Egyptian president is Obama’s — and Israel’s — best hope to get Hamas to back down.

“This is a test of the U.S.-Egypt relationship,” Singh said. “President Obama has invested in developing a relationship with Morsi and his government, and in key moments like this, that relationship is tested. When these key moments come, can you persuade them in seeing the interest they have in de-escalating the situation?”

But how much Obama can push the new president — the first democratically elected leader in Egypt’s history — to lean on Hamas when Morsi’s domestic political constituencies would be inclined to support the radical Palestinian group remains unclear.

“If it escalates further, it’s going to put Mohammed Morsi into an impossible situation,” said Hussein Ibish, a fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine. “He has been essentially maintaining Egypt’s foreign policy as it was under Hosni Mubarak … In the case of a heightened conflict and a ground invasion by Israel, and it’s not dozens of Palestinians getting killed but hundreds, it would really call Morsi’s bluff. He would have to come out as the guy basically continuing Egypt’s foreign policy or the guy changing it.”

All of this takes place against the backdrop of Palestinians eager to make a bid for official recognition from the United Nations — a move that has wide support among Arab nations but that would force Obama to issue a pro-Israel U.S. veto. Obama urged Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to abandon the pursuit of recognition when Abbas last week called to congratulate him on reelection.

It’s also against the backdrop of his rocky relationship with Netanyahu, who’s facing his own elections in January.

“You have a two-term president who is presiding over relationships with Israel and Egypt that are more complex and more dysfunctional than I can remember,” said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East peace negotiator during the Bush administration. “No American president … has any kind of flexibility in dealing with an Israeli security problem like this.”

That leaves Obama without many good options — on Egypt, on Israel or in the Middle East overall.

“The Egyptians have got to know also that there will come a point in their support for Gaza when they are really putting their relationship with the U.S. at risk, and I assume they don’t want to do that,” said Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and former aide to President George W. Bush. “What the administration can say is there is a hold on foreign aid to Egypt now and if this goes on this is going to become more and more difficult and then impossible to lift.”

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